During recent years, automated transaction processing systems (e.g., telephone call processing systems) have increased in power and flexibility. Processing systems that are designed to aid direct telephone marketing or other telephone-based service providers have changed the configuration of physical sites. Previously, human agents at a single physical site handled inbound and outbound calls with minimal automation of agent and remote customer transactions. Today, many physical sites have been replaced by a virtual site which may be networked to multiple physical call centers that employ home and in-office workers who initiate and respond to remote customer transactions over different media, while creating and using a large amount of business-specific information.
The transformation of physical call center sites into virtual sites changes the type of business applications that users or developers must create and maintain. Originally, writing a business application for a call router consisted of defining call routing tables for a single site. Each routing table defines a workflow for describing how telephone calls and other transactions are distributed to agents, commonly referred to as automatic call distribution. Today, a business application can span multiple sites, employing distributed workflows that require the coordination of geographically distributed routing tables. Multiple software tools may be used to create various components of such systems. Because different users have different transaction flow requirements, the system for each user may become a confusing mosaic of interdependent applications, each created and maintained by different software tools. Multiple software tools may increase the difficulty in coordinating workflows across distributed execution environments, increase application development time, increase lifecycle maintenance costs, and increase the time required to make changes and enhancements to such systems.
In existing systems, the generation of routing tables or routing procedures to control transaction flows requires computer programming skills. Additionally, specific training is generally required to learn how to generate routing tables. This specialized knowledge and training is required both to generate routing tables and to edit or modify existing routing tables.
Therefore, there is a need to minimize potential confusion caused by the use of multiple software tools and simplify the generation of workflow definitions. There is a further need to coordinate workflows across distributed execution environments, reduce application development time, decrease life cycle maintenance costs, and decrease the time required to make changes to such systems.